Modern consumer electronics, such as smart phones, personal digital assistants, and location based services devices, as well as enterprise electronics, such as servers and storage arrays, are packing more integrated circuits into an ever shrinking physical space with expectations for decreasing cost. Every new generation of integrated circuits with increased operating frequency, performance and the higher level of large scale integration have underscored the need for back mixed-signal solutions. Numerous technologies have been developed to meet these requirements. Some of the research and development strategies focus on new technologies while others focus on improving the mature package technologies.
The continued emphasis in the semiconductor technology is to create improved performance semiconductor devices at competitive prices. This emphasis over the years has resulted in extreme miniaturization of semiconductor devices, made possible by continued advances of semiconductor processes and materials in combination with new and sophisticated device designs. Numerous integrated circuit designs are aimed for mixed-signal designs by incorporating analog functions. One of the major challenges in the creation of analog processing circuitry (using digital processing procedures and equipment) is that a number of the components that are used for analog circuitry are large in size and are therefore not readily integrated into integrated circuits. The main components that offer a challenge in this respect are capacitors, resistors, and inductors, since these components are, for typical analog processing circuits, are of considerable size.
In response to the demands for improved package performance and analog circuitry integration, other approaches pack discrete analog devices into the integrated circuit package. This mixed-signal integrated circuit technology or system in package (SIP) is another approach to reduce the space required for the integrated circuits content. Stacking integrated circuits is another approach to pack more integrated circuit content while minimizing the dimensions of the package. But these packaging types have some problems requiring additional process steps and physical space.
Thus, a need still remains for the stacked integrated circuit package system providing low cost manufacturing as well as improved performance. In view of the ever-increasing need to save costs and improve efficiencies, it is more and more critical that answers be found to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.